Tuesday, June 10, 2014

#SLA2014 : Closing General Session

Brandy King

- Her topic is "Having It All"

Assumptions:

Those here have a career and not just a job.

To be here we've given up commitments.

Our careers are just one part of our busy lives. 50% of our lives are spent a work. We need work-life balance. It is fuzzy where work ends and life begins. You can think of our lives as being divided into three areas: family, career and volunteering. Some people have clear borders between these areas. King has blurred the borders of her life. Flexibility has a price and may mean readjusting multiple schedules. What works for each person will be different. And priorities will need to reassessed, because things change.

Having it all means successfully negotiating the borders. Can we arrange our priorities into a fe pew major categories? Can we then define the borders between them?

Josh Maleeff - His topic is "Virtual Learning/Training"

The training room is becoming less common. What changed? Technologies have changed to allow elearning. If you remove travel, you should save time and money. With elearning there is the temptation of having other distractions. Technology can be a great tool for enhancing learning. With a webinar, keep it small and follow best practices. For example, engage people regularly (every four minutes). How do you engage and motivate learners? Gamification is one option. Two types of gamification: structural and content.

Maleeff noted that our conference badges have game elements (those ribbons). He then pointed to a element on LinkedIn that is a game element and has gotten people to further complete their profiles. Yes, there are both easy and advanced ways of implementing gaming elements.

Heather Piwowar - from ImpactStory.org - We cannot be satisfied in how people build on our digital content. We need to build better tools for discover and learning. We need better infrastructure.

What allowed us to build skyscrapers? Elevators. What are the elevators of the information world? She suggests open borders on our data/information (open licenses, etc.). It will take a while to understand what we need.

Sarah Glassmeyer - Professional Communication - It is something that we do every day, in words, dress, etc. People think she's provocative, but really she's a human cat. She is provocative because she tells the truth. Truth is a funny thing. We say that we value it, but we act differently than that. When you have to speak up and tell the truth, you are disrupting the current status quo of the situation. We must speak up and be honest, if we're going to improve.

"I just have a bad case of I can't shut the f***-up-itis."

Her rules for her self:

Act, not react.

It is okay to just drop the mic and just leave.

Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean that they are wrong.

Own your sh*t.

F*ck 'em if they can't take a joke.

Yes, you have emotions and have blood in the game. And yes, it hurts when people don't get along.

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About Me

Jill Hurst-Wahl is an associate professor of practice in the Syracuse University School of Information Studies and the director of both its library and information science & LIS with school media specialization programs. She is a member of the USNY Technology Policy and Practices Council. A former corporate librarian, Jill has always been an advocate for expanding the career opportunities for LIS graduates. Her interests include digitization, digital libraries, copyright, web x.0 and social media.